After a great deal of searching Fitzgerald and Hemingway found the garage where Fitzgerald had left the car.

Hemingway was amazed to find the car’s roof was missing, and writes in A Moveable Feast that:

” The top had been damaged in unloading the car in Marseilles, or it had been damaged in Marseilles in some manner and Zelda had ordered it cut away and refused to have it replaced. His wife hated car tops, Scott told me, and without the top they had driven as far as Lyon where they were halted by the rain. The car was in fair shape otherwise and Scott paid the bill after disputing several charges for washing, greasing, and for adding two litres of oil. The garage man explained to me that the car needed new piston rings and had evidently been run without sufficient oil and water. He showed me how it had heated up and burned the paint off the motor. He said if I could persuade Monsieur to have a ring job done in Paris, the car, which was a good little car, would be able to give the service it was built for.”

The garage owner then tried to persuade Fitzgerald to have a new roof put on, pointing out that neither of them had waterproofs and that it looked like it might rain. Hemingway suggested to Fitzgerald that it might be a good idea to at least buy waterproofs, but to no avail. Fitzgerald was now keen to get back to Paris.

So the intrepid duo squeezed themselves into the tiny Renault, and after about an hour they were stopped by torrential rain forcing them into the nearest café. In all, that first afternoon, they were stopped ten times by rain, and as Hemingway points out in his memoir if they had had waterproofs they could have motored on pleasantly, instead of parking under trees every few miles.

During one spell under a roadside tree the two writers ate the lunch the hotel in Lyon had prepared for them, which included:

“…an excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Mâcon wine and Scott was very happy when we drank the white Mâconnais at each of our stops.”